GoDaddy Hacked By Anonymous Member, Millions Of Sites Down

On Monday, the web host and domain registrar GoDaddy went down, taking millions of sites along with it.

At the time of this writing, everything is still down.

The communication about the problem came through the GoDaddy Twitter account. The company acknowledged it was aware of the problem and is trying to resolve it.

According to TechCrunch.com, customers have been complaining that GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts, GoDaddy phone service and all the sites utilizing GoDaddy’s large Domain Name System (DNS) service are also down, affecting people worldwide.

Go Daddy is the host of 5 million web sites globally and it oversees a total of 52 million domain names. Because the company provides domain name services for a large portion of its managed names, a DNS outage impairs millions of web sites on Internet.

In April, former CEO Warren Adelman said to Data Center Knowledge, “We handle 10 billion DNS queries a day. A good chunk of the Internet resolves because of us.”

This isn’t the first time that Go Daddy has been attacked electronically. It is a frequent target on the five million web sites that it hosts. The company has said it blocks 2.5 million brute force attacks hourly and they are monitored in the company’s Scottsdale headquarters.

How did Monday’s attack happen? Reports have said that a member of Anonymous known as AnonymousOwn3r has claimed responsibility and tweeted it is not an Anonymous collective action.

AnonymousOwn3r’s bio says, “Security leader of #Anonymous (~Official member~).” The individual is supposedly from Brazil but he/she hasn’t explained why GoDaddy was the target of today’s take down.

According to Tech Crunch, in 2011, GoDaddy had been pressured to oppose SOPA, the upopular Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills. GoDaddy became a target of protests after their public opposition.

Customers started moving domains from the service but whether this was connected to AnonymousOwn3r, a tweet came out “I’m not anti go daddy, you guys will undestand because i did this attack.”

Angry responses followed for the AnonymousOwn3r tweets including, “Duuude? This attack affects not only corporations but also ppl who support your ideology. whats the rationale?” tweeted Miguel Govea.

Kyle Scott, a sports blogger according to NBC, tweeted, “So you’re all about openness and freedom yet you take down thousands of independent websites that help with that cause?”

Because GoDaddy is aware of the issue and concerns, hopefully it will be resolved soon.

Author: Sheeraz RazaSheeraz is our COO (Chief - Operations), his primary duty is curating and editing of ValueWalk. He is main reason behind the rapid growth of the business.
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